[charleski]

Originally Posted by karunaji

It doesn't matter if they can. They question is do we really need it?

Yes we do.

It is rarely that a specific font is a part of author's intended message or even part of reasons why we read the story. It was fine with pbooks because that's the feature of the medium and there was no other choice. Publishers often designed their own fonts to send a message but often it was a message from a publisher, not from an author.

That's just not true. Different books use different fonts because they're different texts and aim to evoke different moods. And it works. It might not be readily apparent to you, but that's because good body text typography should not call attention to itself. But it's still important, even if you don't understand it.

If you want to highlight a certain character one must look for other ways to do it.

Why? Again, this is just nonsense, trying to impose new restrictions on the design of books that are completely spurious.

So, maybe it is a blessing in disguise that mobi does not support font embedding. It gives more power to author with their written word and makes publishers less visible. There is some loss but the gain is much bigger.

You really just don't understand book design at all, do you? This has nothing to do with 'giving power to the author'.

Here's someone who does (guess what, he's an author):
"I get this a lot from dedicated ebook readers: "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!"

I think this is a peculiar kind of brain damage or mental scarring that mostly afflicts those who have read one too many OCR'd and badly proof-read scans of pirate copies on their Palm III with a 160x160 pixel black and white display. To reach a mass audience, ebooks are going to have to be comparably readable to a dead tree edition: sensible use of screen fonts, layout directives, and some eyeball candy are all part of the package."